Restricted dynamic heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem with time windows

Abstract

This paper tackles a Restricted Dynamic Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows as a real-world application of a courier service company in the Canary Islands, Spain. In this particular application of the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW), customer requests can be either known at the beginning of the planning horizon or dynamically revealed over the day. Moreover, a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles has to be routed in real time. In addition, some other constraints required by the company, such as the allowance of extra hours for the vehicles, as well as, the use of several objective functions, are taken into account. This paper proposes a metaheuristic procedure to solve this particular problem. It has already been installed in the fleet management system of the company. The computational experiments indicate that the proposed method is both feasible to solve this real-world problem and competitive with the literature. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.